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Dessert

Cottage Pudding

A simple baked pudding made with butter, eggs, flour, sugar, milk, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Cottage Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the batter

  1. Rub the butter into the sugar until well combined.

  2. Add the beaten egg yolks and milk, mixing well.

  3. Incorporate the flour and salt, then fold in the whipped egg whites alternately with the yolk mixture.

  4. Pour the batter into a buttered mold.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

  2. Turn out onto a dish and cut into slices while hot.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Whipped whites give lift and structure, while yolks add richness and tenderness to the crumb.
Flour
Provides the structure that holds the cake's crumb once baked.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and a rich flavor in the crumb.
Sugar
Sweetens the batter and helps tenderize the crumb and brown the surface.
Milk
Adds moisture and hydrates the flour so the batter can set during baking.

The step that matters

Folding in the whipped egg whites. Egg whites hold air that makes the pudding rise. Folding gently with alternating additions keeps that air in; stirring vigorously deflates the batter and yields a dense result.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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